Socialism and radical Islam: a marriage made in Hell

WASHINGTON, January 12, 2015 — When leftwing film director Michael Moore met dictator Hugo Chávez at the Venice Film Festival in 2009, he told his Twitter followers that the Venezuelan strongman “declared the oil belongs to the people. He used the oil money to eliminate 75% of extreme poverty, provide free health & education for all. That made him dangerous. [The] U.S. approved a coup to overthrow him even though he was a democratically-elected president.”

When cancer, not a U.S. directed coup d’état, eventually took Chávez’s life, actor Sean Penn noted, “Venezuela and its revolution will endure under the proven leadership of vice president [Nicolas] Maduro.”

Last February, director Oliver Stone told Venezuelan students protesting the strong-armed tactics of their socialist oppressors, “There is a method by which you can protest – but now, the opposition is increasingly behaving like the Republican Party here in the United States, where it is trying to block, criticize, destroy any attempt at negotiation or trying to do business and get on with it.”

Wow! Talk about paranoid! Socialism, like radical Islam, is such a shaky ideology that the flimsiest opposition to its legitimacy — whether from French cartoonists or the GOP’s anemic cartoon leadership — is considered a paramount threat.

And like radical Islam, socialism must rely on armed thugs to enforce compliance with its absurd dogmas.

Last New Year’s Eve, while most people dressed up for parties and made resolutions, Alejandro Cegarra stood across the street from a Venezuelan state-controlled supermarket and photographed a long line of people waiting to enter.

“He was approached by officers of the National Guard who ordered him to stop,” The BBC reported, “and he live tweeted about it …”

The supermarket manager even asked Venezuelan storm troopers to arrest Cegarra, but a local journalist persuaded the armed socialist guardians against it. As others began re-tweeting Cegarra’s photos, still others began tweeting their own snapshots of empty shelves in stores across the socialist nation.

If that wasn’t bad enough, Venezuela’s 100 McDonald’s fast food restaurants ran out of potatoes for their delicious and ubiquitous french-fries. They are forced to sell deep-fried yucca instead.

Telesur, a state-controlled media outlet, said McDonald’s was waging “economic war on Venezuela.”

When the nation’s famous ice cream company Coromoto closed due to a milk shortage, Telesur said, “Despite the manipulation by the Coromoto ice-cream shop, in which they blame their closure on a ‘lack of ingredients’ … Manuel de Silva [owner of Coromoto] is a citizen from the opposition, and he has all the right to be so, but what he said is a lie and his action was forethought and programmed for mass media in the low intensity war against the current government.”

Shortages are supposed to be impossible under socialism. Its utopian planners tell us they have all the necessary information to build a perfect future: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” Venezuela’s economic planners failed to predict or plan for the global drop in oil prices.

Failure to fulfill their utopian mandate is itself a war on social justice. And so, the defenders of this twisted faith must find enemies to blame for their inadequacies.

Only in the paranoid minds of Oliver Stone and Venezuela’s socialist minders are guys wearing paper hats and dunking french-fries into boiling oil — and those mixing milk, cream, sugar and vanilla extract into soft-swirl confections — soldiers waging war on income redistribution.

And the angry utopians railing against reality have formed an alliance.

A paper issued by Canada’s Center for a Secure and Free Society said, “Extending cooperation with Iran, Venezuela’s radical socialist government has been instrumental in providing fraudulent passports and visas to Iranians and other Islamist extremists seeking to slip unnoticed into North America … Latin America was the largest prior embarkation region for improperly documented Iranians migrating to Canada who seek refugee status … the majority passed through Caracas, Venezuela.”

Like Venezuela’s government, the late Osama bin Laden blamed the failures of his backward, bankrupt, anti-intellectual ideology on others. “Islam,” said bin Laden, suffers from “aggression, inequity and injustice imposed on them by the Zionist-Crusaders,” with Islam’s “wealth as loot in the hands of its enemies.”

More than a half century ago, Chávez mentor Fidel Castro said, “I am a Marxist-Leninist and shall be one until the end of my life … Marxism or scientific socialism has become the revolutionary movement of the working class.”

The theory of “scientific socialism” insists that its cockeyed nostrums must adhere to Galileo’s scientific method, holding it to an empirical standard.

“The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore,” an old, tired and sickly Castro mumbled in reply.

Radical Islam and dead socialism are ideal bedfellows. They wage a bloody and pointless war against freedom, progress and modernity that, if ever unleashed to their full potential, would blithely toss these superstitious dolts upon the ash heap of history.